AirVPN Vs Hotspot Shield Comparison: Give Us 2 Minutes, We’ll Give You The Facts

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Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the best service for you.

While anyone can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website begins with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anyone can declare to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of 2 lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications service provider Iridium previously ran it, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

During the last years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger business either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is discussed and information the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.

AirVPN takes the non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up versus its rivals with such strong personal privacy qualifications?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than the majority of, with only 246 servers spread out throughout 23 countries.

Many servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the lack of variety of servers reduces the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is popular for its outstanding performance across its server network, with lots of nations having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide an accurate evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most dependable and secure method to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.

Many ports and protocols are offered; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. In addition, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.

When it comes down to it, no choice is given to any application, service, or protocol. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can get rid of internet restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely dependable. The absence of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, however it won’t put the more recent protocol totally in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy issues are addressed.

AirVPN has actually likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can quickly switch servers as often as you like.

You can keep an eye on the existing load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).

There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, but because there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being provided will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great thing about this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before registering. You do not need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?

When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is very clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no individual details logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It just gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, but you can request for this information to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can figure out what sort of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping strategies will fail against AirVPN because your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they abide by EU personal privacy guidelines which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can utilize it to learn who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection offered.

You can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor if your ISP or country obstructs OpenVPN.

Open-source clients and a lively community online forum allow you to get a sense of what present users are stating about the service prior to registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This suggests that anyone can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but just ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been examined by a third party.

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the finest offered. The very first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s terrific because it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you will not be able to change your account’s password if you don’t utilize one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence information). But even if the government asked for user information, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, offered on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers who utilize it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is easy, and it has all the information you need to connect to a VPN.

Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not difficult to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more challenging learning curve for inexperienced users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download options. There are builds for various running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing doesn’t operate on your setup.

After introducing it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. When you’re ended up, you simply click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do so much more given that AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer launches, however you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Even though it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe tunnel. Many basic kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, but you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

Eddie’s design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely displays the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.

The Servers page shows all offered servers in the network, in addition to comprehensive information about every one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Remarkable stuff!

This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.

The Countries page displays the variety of servers readily available in each nation at a glance, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also revealed. Lots of servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.

A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be found on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you may select as numerous nations as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that nation will be gotten rid of, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.

By choosing a country, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and select the server you desire in a particular nation. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab displays a basic throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.

While most apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained details, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data uploaded and downloaded, and a lot more.

Power users, in particular, should value the ability to utilize a VPN with all the info they could ever desire about the various locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a detailed record of connections, routes, and other data.

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This permits you to tweak the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel through more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really competent user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be hard to figure out what particular settings do and how to get the wanted outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to customization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply due to the fact that of its intricacy. Remember that the program usually operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings until you look for them. If you periodically long for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t wish to utilize Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software provides the same substantial configuration options as its desktop sibling and useful status info.

Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and select a particular city on the exact same page. Some helpful text additions make the information more understandable, however it’s still quite tough to understand in some spots.

Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still a lot more than the majority of people will ever require. The software application also tries a bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to describe what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally connects rapidly and is ready to enter less than 10 seconds.

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In regards to personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which reveals that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition because AirVPN only supports OpenVPN.

However, reviewers have reported speeds to be excellent. Undoubtedly, one said there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly excellent overall.

While it wasn’t rather on top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for the majority of people, and scenarios like HD video gaming, video, and streaming conferencing certainly won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server locations. This might limit the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, but maybe less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Indeed, some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. Nevertheless, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix rarely work, and when they do, discovering the best server requires lengthy trial and error. This is probably since, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

Thankfully, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can check to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.

Streaming is certainly not an area in which AirVPN stands out, simply since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

Yes, it does; every internet protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Indeed, Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to jump through. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has decent speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no problems whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

AirVPN offers a larger range of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five gadgets simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional choice for people who reside in a household house or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for most people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Prices varies based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. A lot of plans offer good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the very best deal.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be quickly transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

The present plans offered are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month

Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month

One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month

Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month

Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month

AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide choices are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day complimentary trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and using the voucher code they send you.

There’s likewise a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they haven’t broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

AirVPN has a different customer support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it offers email assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get an action. That stated, the email support is high quality, and the representatives are helpful and friendly, but the thorough responses can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of details, consisting of a large Frequently asked questions area that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several topics, however beginners will have the exact same problems comprehending a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on apps and servers alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.

Network Lock/Kill Switch.

Split tunneling.

Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.

Supports Tor over VPN.

Easy app installation and use.

Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.

Strong Customer Service.

Active Community Online Forums and Detailed Guides.

Great costs, especially for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists shield you from ads, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t extremely easy to use or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are a lot of advanced choices.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with excellent rates. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. But even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to use if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than much of its competing VPN rivals.

When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more focused on securing your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

It may not ensure the very same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good alternative for consumers who value their personal privacy.

While it does not hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an excellent option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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